1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a repair information management apparatus for managing repair information of medical equipment, a method for operating a repair information management apparatus, and a repair information management system.
2. Description Related to the Prior Art
Medical equipment such as endoscopes are used for medical examinations and treatments of patients. In case where a medical equipment is out of order, the faulty medical equipment is sent to a repair center of a medical equipment manufacturer and repaired by a repair technician. After receiving the faulty medical equipment from a user, the repair technician obtains failure descriptions and creates a repair plan based on the failure descriptions. After the user accepts the repair plan, the repair technician repairs the endoscope based on the repair plan. The failure descriptions and repair information related to the repair, such as the repair plan, are stored as a history of repairs performed by the repair technician.
To facilitate managing the repair information, Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-015082 discloses a repair information management apparatus for managing repair information of medical equipment. The disclosed repair information management apparatus is a computer system which receives repair requests from users of the medical equipment, creates repair plans based on the failure descriptions, and manages the failure information. The repair information management apparatus comprises an intermediary center terminal, which receives the repair request from the user, and a repair center terminal, which is disposed in a repair center where repair is performed. The repair center terminal manages failure information transmitted from the intermediary center. The intermediary center terminal is used for obtaining the failure descriptions based on the information from the user and creating the repair plans. The created repair plans are transmitted to the user. The user selects one of the repair plans, and the selected repair plan is transmitted to the repair center terminal. The repair center terminal manages the repair information.
Since the medical equipment has been sold to the users all over the country, it is preferred to provide a plurality of repair centers in the country in view of users' convenience, for example, speedy repairs. Furthermore, due to the recent globalization, a significant amount of the medical equipment produced by a domestic manufacturer has been exported and used. Many repair centers have been opened in the equipment-importing countries to cope with requests to repair the imported medical equipment. Since the repair information is useful for improving the medical equipment and developing new products, it is preferred to collectively manage the repair information even if the repair centers are established in many countries. With the use of the repair information management apparatus disclosed in the Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-015082, the terminals located in one or many countries are connected to a domestic server through a network, and thereby the collective management of the repair information is performed.
To repair the medical equipment appropriately, the repair technician is required to have repair skill of a certain level or more. For this reason, the medical equipment manufacturer evaluates the repair skills of the repair technicians and provides training courses to the repair technicians based on the results of the evaluations. Thus, the repair skill of each repair technician is improved and ensured. Since the training courses are not effective unless they match the repair skill levels of the repair technicians, correct evaluation of the repair skill of each repair technician is a prerequisite for improving the repair skills of the repair technicians. It is easy for a supervisor to correctly evaluate the repair skill of each repair technician in a case where there are few repair centers (or few repair staffs). The correct evaluation of the repair skills becomes more difficult as the number of the repair centers increases. In particular, in a case where the repair centers operate in many countries, the correct evaluation of the repair skills is extremely difficult due to cultural gaps such as languages. The repair information management apparatus disclosed in the Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-015082 may enable the collective management of the information related to the repair skills of the repair technicians in the repair centers, through collecting the repair information together with the information related to the repair skills. The evaluation may be less accurate than that performed by direct evaluation by a supervisor. However, it is possible to make the evaluation close to a correct one through determining objective evaluation items and collecting information related to the evaluation items from every repair technician.
Even if the information related to the repair skills is managed collectively, the repair skills cannot be evaluated correctly unless evaluation items are not appropriate. Conventional evaluation items for the repair skills are, for example, simple track records such as years of experience as a repair technician or the number of repairs performed and a history of the repair training courses taken. However, these evaluation items have not been adequate for evaluating the repair skills correctly. This is because the medical equipment has various models, and difficulty levels of the repairs vary depending on the models and the repair descriptions. Thus, the repair skills of the repair technicians cannot be evaluated correctly only with the simple track records without consideration of the models of the medical equipment and the difficulty levels of the repairs.